Built to Survive the Real World: Curated by Neville Wakefield

January 15 - March 14, 2009


Andrew Roth is pleased to present vintage and contemporary multi-media work by Bruce Conner, George Herms, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Dean Stockwell.

On view are three assemblage works from the ’60s and one oversize black-and-white photograph from the ’70s by Bruce Conner. George Herms presents early assemblage and collage works from the ’60s and ’70s along with three more recent assemblage pieces. Robert Dean Stockwell features recent oversize collages and Dennis Hopper contributes seven black-and-white photographs from the ’60s.

Following the untimely death of Wallace Berman in 1976, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Dean Stockwell carried the torch of Semina and the West Coast counterculture movement which was both defined and embraced through art, film, poetry, and the lifestyle of subsequent decades. Its origins may belong to a view of life as a series of equally plausible narratives, each overlaid with strains of sex, alcohol, and drugs and a montage of psychic research and poetic possibility. But in physical terms, their approach to art-making became manifest in the simple act of collage: dense affichiste graffiti, coffee-stained aesthetics, surreal scale shifts, and other signals Rorschached from the beyond. Through their art and friendship, these artists maintained a legacy that, for nearly half a century since its ferment in the Topangas of California and elsewhere, continues to drive a generation for whom their work is barely known.